Monday, October 27, 2003

Forgotten blog.

Let’s see... I would have sworn that I'd posted something yesterday, but I checked blogspot and it looks like I didn't. (Unless blogspot ate it.) I even had a whole "extra" hour to do so. I did some editing on the material fairly early Sunday morning, which may be the reason I thought I posted it Sunday night.

Insert: Joke About Aging. Maybe the Red Skelton line about the three signs of aging. The first: memory loss. The second: I forgot...

But, even in the human scheme of things, I haven't arrived at old age. Give me a few decades. I've been having memory lapses all my life anyway, nothing out of the ordinary. Once someone I knew in college, the son of a college professor, said to me: "Professors forget things too. You should see one who's only wearing a bathrobe, and he can't remember where he’s left his house keys."

Instead of posting, I strove to meet my goal for yesterday, which was to rest as much as possible. Sunday is, after all, a Day of Rest. The weather, distinctly cool (in the 40s), inclined all of us to stay inside. But I did a few things, such as help Lilly build a fort -- I mean the girl's version, a house -- out of the sofa cushions; wash dishes and vacuum; attend to baby duties from time to time (I enjoy feeding Ann noodles); and remove and inspect every one of my cassette tapes.

I'm annoyed that cassettes represent a fading medium. I have more than 100, maybe 150, mostly homemade, some (many) as old as 20 years, and they've help up pretty well.

This was the material I was going to post yesterday -- another page courtesy the not so way-back machine:

October 29, 1996.

Learned this morning the late Morey Amsterdam wrote "Rum and Coca-Cola" among other accomplishments of an old vaudevillian. That's sort of fact you hear on public radio.

Last night Yuriko and I went to see the President speak at Daley Plaza. I was fulfilling an ambition to see an in-office president with my own eyes. Saw Gerald Ford give a little talk in Nashville (I was invited as a "reporter"), but that was about 10 years after the man had achieved the ex-presidency. Saw Michael Dukakis parading on Michigan Ave. just before the '88 election, but you know what happened to him.

Various entertainers showed up to either entertain or merely to encourage us to vote Democratic. A number of has-beens were represented, including Valerie Harper, who had to be introduced as "the actress who played Rhoda," and a singer whose name I forget and whose band I also forget, though it was a supergroup, or at least a popular one, of the '70s. One of their hits opened with the awful line, "Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another you’ve been messing around." Which he sang. Maybe not the best choice of songs for the Clinton campaign, but never mind.

Assorted pols also spoke, including hizzoner Mayor Daley, whom I'd also never heard live. Nobody really said anything of course, the President included. Strange how much of it was familiar, even though practically my only aural exposure to any of this year's election is public radio. The event as a whole lacked any touch of the dramatic, except perhaps a spot of heckling by a Dole supporter. Even the campaign signs, printed in workaday typeface and bereft of any sense of artistic style, were dull. Such is this year’s election. Can't be 1840 every time, I suppose.

They weren't giving away campaign buttons, but selling them, so I didn't get one. Somewhere in a closet, my mother has a collection of campaign buttons and bumper stickers, going all the way back to '64 I believe. I’m sure she didn't buy a one of them, either.